For several years, society has been witnessing a downtrend in the number and nature of the communication terminals used by one and the same individual: nowadays one or more telephones (smartphones, IP telephones, etc.), tablets, connected televisions, computers constitute the personal or shared electronic environment of a large number of individuals.
Connection to the others is possible at any moment, in any place and from all or some of these terminals, through various communication modes or services based on various objects such as SMS, email, voice or video call, instant message, but also message posted on social networks, etc. Access to the others by these modes of communication from any of an individual's terminals has brought about an upgrade in usages: a voice call is launched from a computer, an email is sent from their telephone, an SMS is sent from a tablet, etc.
Each individual possesses several addresses on the basis of which various interlocutors can refer in order to get in contact with him. The set of interlocutor files termed “contact files” held by an individual constitutes the electronic directory comprising the personal details of this individual's various interlocutors. For simplified management, this directory is ever more frequently being moved to the network (and no longer stored locally on each of an individual's terminals): the data and the updates of this electronic directory are then accessible from any of the individual's terminals.
In order to be contacted, an individual generally possesses several addresses per type of address (email address, telephone number, pseudonym, etc.); for example, one or more business telephone numbers, one or more personal telephone numbers, and several electronic messaging addresses, for example to partition the senders (an address for formal exchanges, an address for informal exchanges, an address for junk mail, etc.). However, an individual does not choose the address (or addresses) on the basis of which each of his interlocutors chooses to contact him.
Indeed, whilst he may sometimes control the circulation of his addresses by communicating them himself to a given interlocutor, he hardly controls, if at all, the addresses recovered “on the fly” by his interlocutors or his contacts; for example, a single electronic message sent in error from a business address may supply the contact file of his interlocutor with a new address whilst hitherto the communications between the two individuals were established exclusively through a personal address.
Reciprocally, an individual does not control the ever more numerous personal details of each of his interlocutors. When dispatching an email, the choice of the selection of an electronic address to a recipient from among the possibilities proposed by this recipient's contact file may be a source of questioning; in the case of an initiative of response to a communication of an interlocutor, the automatic input of the recipient's address used (previously sender) is now no longer evidence of a relevant direction of dispatch, from the point of view of the type of addressing or even of the address itself. And yet, the interlocutor wishes to converse with his interlocutor according to the direction which will allow him to get back in contact with the latter as efficiently as possible.